Sutton (43 page)

Willie tells Mad Dog he needs help. Shrink once mentioned a network of disgraced doctors, guys who lost their licenses but still do back-alley stuff. Abortions, bullet removals, so forth. Willie asks Mad Dog if he has any connections in that network. Mad Dog relights a cigar stub.

I might, Willie. But those quacks don’t come cheap.

I’ve got some—savings.

Mad Dog grins, mirthless. I bet you do, he says. I read the papers.

Not as much as you think, Willie says. Which brings me to my next question. What are you doing for dough these days, Mad Dog?

Odd jobs. Bits and snatches. For the waterfront boys.

Bits and snatches?

You know. Guy owes, guy can’t pay, I drop by. Goodbye elbow.

What do you get for a thing like that?

Fifty bucks.

Willie looks away. He hates Mad Dog, and he’s pretty sure the feeling is mutual. What kind of life is this, to seek out such people, to need such people? To ask such people for help?

Fifty bucks, Willie says. Not much.

Oh, elbows are easy, Mad Dog says, misunderstanding. It’s just a hinge. You bend it the wrong way, snap.

Willie steps into the light of the gooseneck. What I’m saying, Mad Dog. How would you like to help me take down a few banks?

Mad Dog points his cigar stub at Willie. That’s like Marciano asking if I want to spar.

Sutton stands before 340 Dean Street, pointing. I used to sit at that window right there. Afternoons, children would come running out of that school up the block. They saw me one day, sitting there, my face covered with bandages, they about-faced and ran in the other direction
.

Photographer does a back-stretching exercise against the hood of the Polara. Bandages, Willie?

From the plastic surgery
.

Reporter holds up his hand. Plastic what now?

He sees patients in the middle of the night, in the office of a legit colleague who gets a kickback for every illegal procedure. Mad Dog sets up the meet, and offers to drive Willie, but Willie wants to do this alone.

A nervous receptionist shows Willie into a small examining room. After half an hour the quack comes in through a second door. The underside of his chin hangs like an udder, his cheeks sag like bread dough. Willie wonders why Quack hasn’t let one of his colleagues, disgraced or legit, fix his own kisser.

Hello, Mr. Loring.

Willie hands him an envelope full of cash. Quack shoves the envelope quickly into the pocket of his white coat, tells Willie to sit on a paper-covered table. Holding up a sketch pad, he draws a giant circle, marks the circle with x’s, dotted lines. The circle apparently is Willie’s face.

First, Mr. Loring, I’m going to make a two-inch incision in the columella. That’s the tissue just between your nostrils. Then I’m going to peel back the skin. Then I’m going to cut away any excess cartilage and scar tissue and take a grindstone to any protruding or asymmetrical bone. Essentially reshaping the nose God gave you. I’ll need to work faster than normal, because of the, ah, special circumstances. And I won’t have an assistant. So I must tell you, this may not be perfect, and there will be more risks than typically associated with such a procedure. Infection, so on, so forth.

What were you thinking to do for the pain?

You’ll be completely under.

Nah. Give me a local.

Willie isn’t letting anyone put him under. He has too many secrets, too many memories of Shrink, the slippery hypnotist. Quack opens his eyes wider. Whatever you say, Mr. Loring.

He sounds tickled that Willie will be awake. He also sounds a little too keen to get down to cutting. He asks if Willie would like him to do the eyes while he’s at it. Give the lids a lift? Stay away from my eyes, Willie says. Willie looks again at the diagram of his face on the legal pad. He’s troubled that Quack has misspelled the word
nasal
. Willie wishes he’d asked Mad Dog what Quack did to lose his medical license. Watching Quack fondle his blades, Willie thinks it might have been something bad.

Willie lies back. In goes the needle. The pain isn’t much. It’s the other sensations that make the operation traumatic. Willie can feel every cut, every chip, every grind. Such violent acts on such a delicate appendage. He thinks about sawing the bars of his cells, chipping the rock under Eastern State. He thinks about Father hammering an anvil. He passes out.

When he opens his eyes the lights are off. Quack is gone, the nervous receptionist is gone. Willie is still on the paper-covered table, still on his back. He feels as if his nose has been removed, the hole filled with a tent stake. He rolls off the table, staggers to a wall mirror. He has two black eyes and across the center of his face are two blood-soaked bandages in a large X.

His fedora pulled low, he walks home. Landlady happens to be coming down the stairs as he’s going up. She shrieks, babbles. Thank God he’s been brushing up on his Spanish with her grown daughter.
Estoy bien
, he says.
No es nada. Gracias. Me metí en una pelea con unos hombres en un bar
.

For weeks Willie hides in his room. Mad Dog brings him food and books—a bizarre assortment of titles. Willie told Mad Dog to ask the clerk for some great books. The clerk must have thought Mad Dog meant the Great Books. So while convalescing Willie encounters Dante, Woolf, and Proust for the first time.

Proust overpowers him. The sentences are so long they make his nose hurt. Either this Proust is bughouse or else Willie’s having a bad reaction to Mad Dog’s black-market painkillers. He can’t make heads or tails of the plot. There is no plot. And yet sometimes an interminable sentence will end with an image that brings a lump to Willie’s throat, or a turn of phrase will knock loose a piece of Willie’s forgotten past. Something deep inside him responds to Proust’s obsession with time, his defiance of time. Only a man at war with time would write a million-word book. Willie can’t wait to get to the sixth volume—
The Fugitive
.

At Willie’s request Mad Dog also brings him
Peace of Soul
, by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Willie read a review in the paper. He’s been troubled about his soul, he longs for peace—it sounded interesting. In fact it rivets him. He sits up all night, reads the book cover to cover, goes back and rereads the parts about remorse. Whole passages seem addressed to him. Remorse, according to Sheen, is a sin. Remorse is prideful, self-centered. Judas felt remorse. Instead, Sheen says, we must emulate Peter—
who felt not remorse but God-centered regret
.

Willie has no remorse, and some days he feels nothing but regret, so he’s comforted. According to Sheen, his account with God is square.

Then, however, Sheen says something that haunts Willie, that stays with him longer than the memory of Quack’s blades. Along with regretting, Sheen says, a sinner must fully
confess
. Willie sets the book down, lights a Chesterfield. Regret
and
a full confession? Pretty steep price for eternal salvation. He looks at the ceiling. Being a fugitive has made him more acutely aware of the Eyes that always see. The One from whom we can never hide. He asks the ceiling of his tiny furnished room if Sheen is right. Confess? Really? And if he doesn’t—what then?

He feels an answer coming. A judgment. He has a hunch it’s going to hurt. Distracted, he blows smoke through his sutured nostrils, causing a tiny atom bomb of blinding pain.

A week after the surgery Willie is due to have Quack remove the stitches. He can’t face that ghoul again. Mad Dog brings him a bottle of Jameson and a pair of needle-nose pliers. Willie gulps the whiskey, bites a rag, yanks the stitches himself. Mad Dog holds the mirror.

After, Willie apologizes to Mad Dog for all the screaming.

Mad Dog laughs. Please. I’m used to guys screaming.

Sutton takes one last look at his former window. When you’re a kid, he says, wondering how your life is going to turn out, you never imagine you might end up living under an assumed name, in a furnished room, your face covered with bandages, scaring schoolchildren
.

Reporter fetches his briefcase from the Polara. He puts it on the hood, clicks it open. I saw nothing in the files, he says, about plastic surgery. But now that you mention it, these old photos—there
is
a difference. They really don’t look like you
.

Maybe we
do
have the wrong guy, Photographer says
.

Sutton touches his nose, gives it a squeeze, looks up the block. That quack was insane but he did nice work. Then one day I was walking back to my room and right here I met a girl. Right about where you boys are standing she gave me the big eye. I thought that meant my new nose was a hit. But of course she was a hooker. They can spot a lonely guy from a mile away. With just one look she knew who I was, what I needed. Turned out, though, I was what she needed too
.

She has pale white skin, jet-black hair, large black eyes. One eye is slightly larger than the other. Willie tells her it’s cute. She taps a finger below the larger eye.

This one, she says, was always the same size as its brother. But lately it keep getting bigger, I don’t know why.

He tells her she should see a doctor. She says she doesn’t like doctors. He insists, but she’s stubborn. Half Irish, half Egyptian, she tells Willie.

That explains it, he says.

She was born and raised in Cairo. Her mother was from Dublin, her father was a Mizrahi Jew. During the war, she says, their life was hard. But peace was much harder. Peace unleashed a more localized chaos. Mobs surged into her neighborhood, carrying clubs, torches. They blew up buildings, set houses ablaze, pulled people from their beds. They dragged men through the streets and bludgeoned them in front of their families.

Why? Willie asks.

Israel, she says. Land. Religion. Why people do anything?

The last time she saw her father, he was standing at the front door of their house, waving a carving knife, keeping the mob at bay. He yelled to her mother, Run, run, I’ll find you!

She and her mother bolted out the back door to a neighbor’s house. In the morning her father lay in the street. Pieces of him, she says. She and her mother fled with the neighbor, overland on foot, then by boat to America. On the boat they had to fight off men, even boys. One night they had to fight off the neighbor.

Her mother died four days before the boat reached New York Harbor. Grief, shame, illness, maybe all three. When the boat docked she watched immigration officials carry her mother off like a bag of mail.

She tells Willie her name is Margaret. Willie tells her his name is Julius. They’re in a coffee shop near his room on Dean Street.

Why you wear these dark glasses, Julius?

Some people are after me, Margaret.

Why they after you, Julius?

I’d rather not say, Margaret.

You did crimes, she says softly.

He lights a Chesterfield, looks at the tabletop. He straightens the cutlery. He takes a sip of black coffee. Nods.

Do you hurt anybody?

He doesn’t answer.

She makes two fists, holds them before his face. Do you make harm on anybody?

I go out of my way not to.

You promise?

Yeah.

Fine, she says. Is all that matter to me.

Willie doesn’t have a phone, and neither does Margaret, so they arrange their dates well in advance. They only go out late, very late, when there’s less chance of Willie being spotted, which suits Margaret. She already lives in a nighttime world. She comes to Willie’s room, or else he picks her up from her room at the other end of Brooklyn, and they hit an all-night diner, a jazz club, a movie theater.

They both love movies. Willie feels safest when slouched low in a dark theater, his face in a bag of popcorn, and Margaret feels safest when she can lose herself in a soaring love story. There are many to choose from in 1951. Together they see
A Streetcar Named Desire
,
An American in Paris, The African Queen
. Margaret adores
The African Queen
. As the music rises and the credits roll, as the men and women in the theater crush their cigarettes under their heels and hurry toward the exit, Margaret touches Willie’s arm.

Please, she says.

He looks at her, smiles, eases back into his seat. Sure, he says. I guess I can take another trip down that river with Bogie and Kate.

After the second show they go for coffee. Margaret can’t stop talking about the movie. We are like them, she says.

Who?

Humphrey Bogie and Kathy Hepburns.

Willie looks around the diner, to make sure no one is listening. She chides him. No one care my thoughts about Humphrey Bogie, she says.

Sorry, Willie says. Force of habit. You were saying.

They on their leaky boat, we on ours.

I see. Yeah.

Is them against the world. Is us too, Julius.

Which one of us is Bogie?

She laughs, reaches across the table, takes his hand. You
look
like Bogie.

Willie twitches his lips, rolls his cigarette. Here’s looking at you kid.

Her eyes widen. Julius, you just like him. You should be an actor.

Nah.

What this means, she asks—here is looking at you?

Oh, he says. It’s an expression.

But what it means?

It means—here’s to you.

She squints.

It means cheers, Willie says. Sort of a toast. Like
L’chaim!

And what it means when Bogie says, Let us go while the going is good.

Another expression. Figure of speech.

But what it means?

It means the bad guys are coming, the bad guys are about to kick in the door, let’s get out of here.

But this expression—I don’t understand.

It just means—now.

Then why he does not say
now
? It take less time to say
now
. If he want to go when the good is going—

Going is good.

—then why he waste time with all these words? While he is so busy saying let us go now, the bad guys can be coming.